The Daily - The Burning of Black Tulsa

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

This episode includes disturbing language including racial slurs.In the early 20th century, Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was an epicenter of Black economic influence in the United States. However, in the early hours of June 1, 1921, a white mob — sanctioned by the Tulsa police — swept through the community burning and looting homes and businesses, and killing residents.A century later, the question before Congress, the courts and the United States as a whole is: What would justice look like?Guest: Brent Staples, a member of the New York Times editorial board.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: A century ago, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa perished at the hands of a white mob. Here is what the massacre destroyed.The three known survivors, who were all children in 1921, offered their firsthand accounts of the race massacre at a hearing in Washington last month.A centennial commission that raised $30 million for a history exhibit center has said the government should be responsible for repaying survivors and their descendants.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

My name is Viola Ford Fletcher. I'm a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Two weeks ago, I celebrated my 107th birthday. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, I'm visiting Washington, D.C. for the first time in my life. I'm here seeking justice, and I'm asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921. One hundred years ago today, a massacre of black residents occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was promptly and deliberately forgotten. A country may forget this history, but I cannot.

I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendants do not. Now, the question before Congress, the courts, and the United States as a whole is what does justice mean and look like for the victims of so heinous a crime a century later? I spoke with my colleague, editorial board member Brent Staples. Editorial Board member Brent Stables. It's Tuesday, June 1st. Brent, you have been reporting and researching what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma for decades.

So I wonder if we can start by having you describe Tulsa in the early 1900s. Tulsa in the early 1900s was an oil town. Oil is becoming very big at that point. It's becoming a boom town. And as it boomed, it attracted more and more people to work in the oil fields and also to serve those people who worked in the oil fields and brought that money home, you know, to start restaurants and other businesses. But there was a lot of money there. And so Black people came to the Western frontier for the same reason that white Americans came to the Western frontier. They came to strike it rich, and same to the Western frontier. They came to strike it rich to make your fortune.

And they did. And a lot of these people ended up on the Black side of Tulsa in the neighborhood that was called Greenwood. And what was Greenwood like? Greenwood was, at that point, a mecca of Black economic influence in the United States. It supported somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 people. It had close to 200 businesses, 15 doctors, two dentists, chiropractors, law offices, a hospital, schools. It had a business strip that was known at the time as the Negro Wall Street.

And all this was self-contained on the black side of the tracks in segregated Tulsa. So when you came across the tracks from White, Tulsa, into Greenwood Avenue, one of the first iconic buildings you encountered was the Dreamland Movie Theater. And, you know, beyond that was, you know, the Tulsa Star newspaper. Beyond that was the office of the surgeon A.C. Jackson. Beyond that was the Hotel Stratford. It's said to be the largest hotel owned by a black person in the United States.

65 rooms. Two movie theaters, two newspapers, five hotels, and about 30 restaurants. It was a complete community within a community. From what you're describing sounds enormously vibrant and represents real wealth. How common was an all-Black community of this kind in this moment?

There were Black communities during segregation on the south side of Chicago, of course. There was Black Harlem in New York. But there was nothing quite like Greenwood, because Greenwood had a kind of economic containment zone. All the money that you brought back from the white town stayed in Greenwood. If you worked in the white town, you came home to the black town, dressed up, went downtown, got your hair done, went to the soda fountain, you went to the department store where you bought a suit, then you went across the street and dropped the suit off that you had it measured to be tailored. Then you maybe went out to lunch while it was being done. Everything you had done was recycling Black money in the same place. And so in a Jim Crow state that's built on the notion of Black inferiority, you have these businessmen walking up and down the street with three-piece suits and money.

It's a threat for White Tulsa. And then, on the morning of May 30th, 1921, a black shoeshine man named Dick Rowland is working downtown as usual. A black shoeshine man named Dick Roland is working downtown as usual. He takes a break to go to the bathroom in one of the few places that allows Negroes to use the bathroom. To get to the bathroom, he has to travel in an elevator being run by a white woman. And then something happens. You will never know what.

But according to records and other accounts, the woman screams. And it becomes a classic Southern thing. A black man in close proximity with a white woman is immediately accused of attempted sexual assault. Dick Rowland is arrested the next day. While he's being held a white mob gathers at the jail in the hopes of lynching him

black men from Greenwood ride in to prevent the lynching the two sides exchange words then shots and several men fall dead and the black men withdraw into Greenwood. And this event gives the powers that be in Tulsa

the excuse they need to unleash all their rage and all their discontents at this community. And what form does that take? We know from reports and testimony that the Tulsa police deputized perhaps hundreds of white men. They were sworn in as special deputies. Some were given badges that showed that they were agents of the law. And they were instructed, in effect, to, quote,

go out and kill you, some damn niggers. So in the early hours of June 1st, the mob sleeps through and begins systematically going house to house. In many cases, they looted the houses. In some cases, they shot people outright. And as the day progresses, a wall of flame, a wall of fire, rises and begins steadily marching across the black oasis of Greenwood.

across the black oasis of Greenwood. One after another, homes, businesses, churches, schools, the public library, the hospital, one after another, burned. A lot of what we know about this comes from people who were children at the time. There's an eight-year-old boy named Kenny Booker who's hiding in the attic of his family's home when white men burst in. He can hear his father downstairs pleading, please don't burn my house. Please don't burn my house.

The white men march his father away at gunpoint. And then they lay flame to the house. The white men march his father away at gunpoint. And then they lay flame to the house. Kenny and his siblings upstairs, the smoke begins to come in. They get down and they rush out into the street. They find a landscape that must have been like the Dresden bombing of World War II. Everything is burning. Even the utility poles are burning. People are rushing everywhere, trying to get away. And Kenny has a younger sister by the hand, and she looks up to him and she says, Kenny, is the whole world on fire?

And Kenny says, no, I don't think so. But we're really in trouble here. Elsewhere in Greenwood, a six-year-old girl named Olivia Hooker wakes up, and her house is being pelted by gunfire. She thinks initially that it's hailstones. Her mother grabs her by the hand, parts the blinds, and says, that thing up there on the hill with a flag on it is a machine gun. That's bullets hitting the house.

And this means that's your country shooting at you. I mean, this resembles war. It does resemble war. And Olivia and her parents leave the house because they're driven away by the mob. And as they're leaving, her mother stops and tells people in the white crowd

who have brought their children to see this that a curse will be visited upon them unto the subsequent generations. Hmm. A boy named Elwood Lett is only four and a half years old.

His family actually escapes the immediate vicinity of the conflagration, and they're headed toward another town in their grandfather's wagon. Grandfather puts them in a wagon, hits the horses, and is moving out. As they approach a nearby town, a white

man stands in the road, uses the N word to ask where they're going. The grandfather said, well, we're just going out of town. We're just going out of town. And the white man says, no, you're not today, and shoots him dead in front of the family. So, this

is the experience of children as this unfolds. Wow. By the afternoon of June 1st, there is almost nothing standing. 35 square blocks of this community had been reduced to ashes. More than 8,000 people have been left homeless. We don't know exactly how many killed, but some projections are that as many as 300 people may have been killed. And we're looking at the Dreamland Theater,

the Stratford Hotel, and all these businesses that have been reduced to ashes, and there's nothing but skeletal structures there. Meanwhile, the charges against Dick Rowland, a Black man who's encountered with a white woman in an elevator, triggered all this. Those charges are dropped. If Greenwood is now burned to the ground, and there's no question who is responsible for this, who is responsible for this. What happens next? What kind of options do the people of Greenwood have to seek some kind of justice?

First, something extremely cruel happens. The city of Tulsa tells the outside world that it's going to provide a rebuilding fund and actually discourage fundraising in parts of the country to have the community rebuild. But that fund never materialized. And Black Tulsans filed nearly 200 claims, but the insurance companies declined to pay them because of a riot exclusion clause in the policies. If it was a riot, was this somehow considered a riot? Correct. This was being characterized as a riot, but it clearly was not. When you have a situation

in which the actual authorities of the city deputize and unleash a mob of people who, in fact, destroy property and kill citizens under color of law, how could one call that a riot? That really was almost like a paramilitary action under the city's purview. But the mythology that built up around this with the label of the riot essentially recast this paramilitary activity as though it were a spontaneous eruption of violence that the authorities had nothing to do with. And so this label of riot was a way of sort of diffusing responsibility of saying that there's no particular locus of responsibility for this. So these Black homeowners and business owners, they're not compensated in any way for what has been done to them? No. No, they're not. As a matter of fact, they're actually blamed for the violence. This, after all, was the 1920s.

The Ku Klux Klan was in resurgence. And what was common at the time, all white grand juries. And so there was no recourse through the courts. There was no recourse through insurance, right? There was no recourse from the city. But what's remarkable is that community coalesces and it rebuilds Greenwood. Then a peculiar thing happens. A veil of secrecy falls over this entire event. event. Within some weeks, law enforcement officials forbid people taking photographs of the destruction because it's bad for the city. Conversation in the white town,

hush, don't talk about it, don't write about it, because uncles, sons, other people were involved in the carnage. In the black town, a different form of suppression happens. People who have survived the burning and the murder and this sort of living nightmare begin to withhold the story from their children. Why? Because they are, first of all, terrified that any kind of agitation around this event

would bring a repetition of what they experienced. As one friend of mine told me in Tulsa many years ago, Black folks lived in fear that the whites who had come once might come again. And so we arrive at a situation where within 20 years people who were born in Greenwood do not know that the community had been leveled to the ground and that dead bodies were strewn in the streets. This becomes a deliberate kind of amnesia that grips the city, both the black and white communities,

for another 50 years until 1971, when someone decides it's time to tell the story. We'll be right back. Brent, how does the silence finally break and the story of what happened in Greenwood finally get told? So a few decades after the massacre, a child named Don Ross was growing up in the rebuilt Greenwood. He came of age under the cover of enforced silence. He was 15 years old when he learned from his teacher, who was a survivor of the massacre,

that the community had been destroyed. And he jumps to his feet and says, this could not be true. Nobody would burn down my community. There's no 300 people killed. The people here wouldn't stand for it. It couldn't possibly be true. Wow.

So the first time Don Ross ever heard about this moment, he was incredulous. Yes. He initially refused to believe it. But his teacher settled the matter by producing photographs of the carnage, including images of corpses with arms and legs burned away and coffins stacked on the backs of trucks headed out of town to anonymous graves. The lost story of the massacre becomes a driving force for Don Ross. It propels his journalistic career, and years later, in the 1970s, he helps to start a small magazine. Around the same time, a white amateur historian named Ed Wheeler is working on an article about what happened in Tulsa in 1921. It's a tough article to report.

In the white part of town, the city fathers have suppressed the story to protect the town's reputation. In the black part of town, people who survived are terrified of speaking about it. So as Ed was writing the story, the black sources stipulated that they would only meet him at night in their churches under the guidance of their ministers. And he encountered threats from people. Once a stranger in the street tapped him on the shoulder and said, you'll be sorry if you publish that story. A threatening note was written across the windshield of his car. Best look under your hood from now on.

But he persisted and Ed finishes the story. He goes to the Chamber of Commerce magazine and is told that the magazine cannot publish the story. He appeals to the local newspaper, the Tulsa World, where an editor told him, I would not touch that article with an 11-foot pole. So here's Ed, this big white guy, walking around with this manuscript. And he finds a startup magazine called Oklahoma Impact and Don Ross. So Don, at the time, was looking to publish something special in his magazine to commemorate the 50th year since what was then called the Tulsa Race Riot. And in this article, he has it. The story spreads quickly throughout Greenwood, and this blows the cover off the conspiracy of silence. And this blows the cover off the conspiracy of silence. A little more than a decade later, Don Ross becomes a state legislator who is consumed with justice for the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

And what does that look like? How does Don Ross go about pursuing justice for the survivors? Don Ross is, I think it's around probably his 17th year in the legislature. He convinces the state to create what was called the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. And what exactly was that commission? What was it trying to accomplish? What the commission was charged to do was to finally investigate the event, to try to find out how many people died, provide an estimate of the property damage, and explain what caused the disturbance. But its most controversial part from the very start

was to determine whether or not the state should pay reparations either to the Black District of Greenwood or to individual survivors. They located scores of witnesses, interviewed them, and it is from those witnesses that we find out the contours of this event. Everything I said to you is essentially stuff that's put forward by survivors in transcripts.

And basically, this is how the story actually flowers and comes into full knowledge through the commission. Among other things, a report showed that the police were indeed complicit in the destruction of Greenwood because they deputized part of the mob but destroyed it. Witnesses even talked about seeing law enforcement officials burning some properties. So what the people in Greenwood had hoped for, they had hoped for the detail emerging of the city's abdication of responsibility would force the city and the state to pay restitution, to compensate them for all the damage that they had endured. That did not happen. The legislature instead tried to deal with the matter

by giving survivors commemorative medals. Medals for surviving these attacks? Yes. It was very peculiar, at the least. I mean, the medals trivialized the suffering of the people. Incredibly so. And basically, the survivors, many of whom were in their 90s at the time, decided they were not going to go quietly to the grave. Instead, they filed a lawsuit seeking damages.

But in the state of Oklahoma, civil rights actions have to be filed within two years of the alleged offense. And so the case is dismissed and survivors again receive no reparations. Brent, I'm thinking back now on this magazine publisher turned legislator who you introduced us to, Don Ross, who first succeeded back in the 1970s in breaking the wall of silence around Tulsa. But he wanted more than that.

He wanted reparations. And so as a politician, he gets this commission off the ground, and he succeeds once again in breaking down yet another kind of barrier in getting the official record changed, in establishing what actually happened in Tulsa for the public. But still still what he's really after, which is some kind of action, some kind of effort to make whole these people who have lost so much, that isn't happening. Correct. At times when people were trying to forget this thing, he made the state relive it with him. And he really thought if the damage inflicted by the city and state on this population were made clear, that authorities would be shamed into making restitution.

It's one thing to sort of acknowledge, yes, it was a bad thing. It's quite another to go into the state or city budget and say, we're going to pay X million dollars. That is a level of admission that is beyond the symbolic. Admission of what? That institutional racism govern the police approach to the Black citizens of Greenwood, right? Govern the courts that denied them restitution. Govern the city council that tried to stop them from rebuilding. To sit down and basically compensate them would be to acknowledge the impact of all those forms of institutional racism that presided over this disaster and the suppression of it.

And that, of course, as we know now, is not how it worked out. We're coming up on the centennial of what is widely considered to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the 1921 massacre. As the centennial began to appear on the horizon. Because we've had dialogue over the past year about the difference in the word massacre versus riot. In 2018, a commission that was put together to plan centennial activities changed its name from the Riot Centennial Commission. This commission will now, going forward, be called the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.

To the Massacre Centennial Commission. The word riot, just that word riot, was a reason to deny insurance policies for folks that had their belongings destroyed, their houses burned, and their loved ones massacred. This might seem minor, but in truth, it writes a kind of rhetorical wrong that goes back to the very beginning of this tragedy. Here, this is no longer just some spontaneous explosion of disaffection.

What it at least allows to be considered is that the authorities were directly culpable in essentially engineering a disaster that destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and lost a still unknown number of lives. Also, the city recommitted itself to trying to find mass graves that had long been ruined to contain the bodies of massacre victims. So this aspect of researching the tragedy moves forward and I would say that within

a few years or so we're going to know a lot more about the nature of the loss of life and how it happened. It seems, Brent, that so much of the fight around Tulsa has just been to tell the story of what happened, to just figure out and acknowledge what occurred. But at the end of this journey, what has been achieved here could be seen as quite modest, right? After all this effort, the people of Tulsa, and increasingly the rest of the country, are finally calling this what it is and what it always was.

But that to me raises a question. After an episode like this of forced forgetting, is recovering the memory enough? First of all, let's say uncovering truth is in itself a noble and beneficial thing for all of humanity. I think the better and more noble outcome and the moral outcome would have been for city and state officials to recognize their culpability in a financial way. And the best outcome of all would have been for that acknowledgement to happen before all these survivors who were around in the 90s went off to the grave.

That would have been, I think, a proper denouement to this whole thing. But what we have here, we have a slow process of acknowledgement. We have great swaths of important and bloody history suppressed because the contemporary society is ashamed of them. And you excavate history, keep bringing it forward. And in the end, I think the beneficial results are seen more by posterity than by people living right now. I know it's unsatisfying to say that survivors

and the rest of us may have to content ourselves with a recitation of a long suppressed truth. That does not resolve the matter in the present or in the hearts and the lives of the people affected. But in the end, as we often say, the truth of what happens may have to be enough. Brent, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Greenwood represented all the best of what was possible for black people in America and for all the people. When my family was forced to leave Tulsa, I lost my chance of an education.

I never finished school past the fourth grade. I have never made much money. To this day, I can barely afford my everyday needs. I am 107 years old and have never been seen justice. I pray that one day I will. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, is in jeopardy of losing power after a series of unexpected political maneuvers by his allies and rivals. Over the weekend, a diverse coalition of eight political parties, including one led by Netanyahu's former defense minister,

said they had enough votes in Israel's legislature to replace him. This is a government of surrender, of fraud. Therefore, such a government must not be formed. In a speech, Netanyahu reacted to the announcement with outrage, accused members of the coalition of betraying him, and instructed his right-wing allies not to support what he called a left-wing government. If you're a right-winger, you don't vote for a left-wing government. And if you vote for a left-wing government, you're not a right-winger. This is the simple truth.

Follow it. And. I cannot tell you how proud I am to be here with my Democratic colleagues to say that enough is enough. In Texas, Democratic state lawmakers derailed a Republican bill to restrict voting in the state by staging a dramatic walkout. Based on the tally sheet furnished by the voting clerk, a quorum is apparently not present. The walkout deprived the legislature of the minimum number of lawmakers required to vote on the bill,

forcing Republicans to adjourn the legislative session and abandon their plan for now. The Republican bill, which is supported by Texas's Republican governor, would have restricted absentee voting, granted new powers to partisan poll watchers, and banned both drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting. Today's episode was produced by Nina Potok, Soraya Shockley, Annie Brown, and Daniel Guimet, with help from Alexander Lee Young and Austin Mitchell.

It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Lisa Chow, and engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Sheena Perez and Mallory Covington. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.